Geo-located data is growing in quantities at a rapid rate. Examples of such data include yellow page listings for business, demographic data released by government organizations, encyclopedic data in digital repositories, people's status reports as generated from their GPS-enabled mobile devices, annotated imagery from various repositories, and geo-located entities extracted from hyperlocal blog posts, to name just a few.
A traditional way of visually representing this geo-located data is to render small visual entities on the surface of a map of some type. These entities often take the shape of a pin, thumbtack, small flag, colored dot or similar object. This is a common practice in the map sections of various search engines. This type visual representation, however, suffers from two main problems.
First, as the number of points-of-interest (POI) on a map increases, so too does the number of occluding entities. This occlusion makes entities hard or impossible to be reached, as by being touched, clicked, or otherwise selected by users. Second, as a user manipulates the zoom level of a map, the potential multitude of rendered POIs occlude the map surface in such a way that clutters and make illegible any information, such as geographical features, the map may contain.